Reading, Writhing, Arithmetic, and Death Panels

by Gerard Emershaw

High school freshmen and sophomores at St. Joseph-Ogden High School in St. Joseph, Illinois were presented with the following school assignment:

The following ten people have a problem. They are all in desperate need of Kidney Dialysis (the process that removes wastes from the bloodstream). Unless they receive this procedure, they will die. The local hospital has enough machines to support only six people. That means four people are not going to live. You must decide from the information below which six will survive. Next to each person’s short biography there is a line where you place a score. Put the people in order using 1-10, 1 being the person you want to save first and 10 being the person you would save last. You are only to use the information provided.

The ten patients were identified as follows:

1. A 35-year-old white married female housewife with a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
2. A 65-year-old Latino married male doctor with no children.
3. A 60-year-old black married male lawyer with a 25-year-old son.
4. A 9-year-old white female disabled person.
5. A 20-year-old white male college student.
6. A 40-year-old black married male ex-convict with a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old son.
7. A 23-year-old white unmarried female prostitute with a 3-year-old daughter.
8. A 35-year-old black married male teacher with no children.
9. A 55-year-old white married female Lutheran minister with a 27-year-old son and a 30-year-old daughter.
10. A 47-year-old black unmarried male police officer with no children.

When asked by reporter Lennie Jarratt, Brian Brooks, the school’s principal stated the alleged reason for the lesson:

The assignment you are referring to is not a “Death Panel” assignment.  The assignment is one in the sociology unit of our Introduction To Social Studies class.  The purpose of the assignment is to educate students about social values and how people in our society unfortunately create biases based off of professions, race, gender, etc.  The teacher’s goal is to educate students in the fact that these social value biases exist, and that hopefully students will see things from a different perspective after the activity is completed.  The teacher’s purpose in the element of the assignment you are referring to is to get students emotionally involved to participate in the classroom discussion, and to open their minds to the fact that they themselves have their own social biases.  The assignment has nothing to do with a “Death Panel.”

We encourage parents to contact their son/daughter’s teachers if they have any concerns about an assignment in the classroom.  That line of communication typically clears up any potential misunderstanding.

Many will be unwilling to take Mr. Brooks at his words and will claim that this lesson plan is a covert method of getting students prepared for and willing to accept death panels in the future. Given the failure of public schools in actually educating students properly and the eagerness of public schools to indoctrinate students, it is possible that Mr. Brooks is being less than honest.

The more interesting question concerns how one should deal with this thought experiment. There are two correct answers. One of these involves the immediate answer. The other is a broader and longer term answer.

One may be more than tempted to use the strategy employed by James Tiberius Kirk when facing the Kobayashi Maru and cheat. However, the rules of this game dictate that six of the ten patients will live, and four will die. Progressives, fascists, communists, and other collectivists who apply utilitarian thinking will rank the patients according to their own warped prejudices. However, judging the value of human beings is not something that a hospital or any business should do. Yes, that is right. A hospital is a business. In order to avoid having to make the kind of moral judgments that ought not be made at all, and especially ought not be made by bureaucratic bean counters, the hospital should simply offer its dialysis services first come, first serve on a contractual basis. While the bleeding heart will object and claim that this is unjust because it means only those who can afford the service will get it, this is actually the most just. Those who can afford the service will pay for it. Perhaps some out of pocket and others through insurance. However, by earning a profit, the hospital will be able to put some of that money back into the business and buy additional dialysis machines. Making the pie bigger through free market profits enables more to benefit.

The longer term answer involves fixing the health care system and the economy in general. If the health care system is overhauled according to free market principles, the cost of dialysis and other crucial medical procedures will drop. However, the economy needs to be based more on free market principles as a whole. If corporatist monstrosities like the Federal Reserve’s “inflation tax,” big government corporate and medical regulations, high taxes, and wasteful government spending were to disappear, then people would be wealthier as a whole and more able to afford necessary medical procedures such as dialysis. In reality, death panels can only exist where there is big government and collectivism.